By Clara Ann Bagnoli ’28
Editor-in-Chief
So you’ve found yourself at paradise on Earth? Congratulations and welcome; we’ve been waiting for you all summer, and we’re so glad you‘re finally here! Now that NSPO week is over, some of the reality may be setting in: this is a new chapter of your life. Goodbye to the days of living with family and hello to two strangers from states you’ve never been to. Goodbye bubble baths and hello shower shoes. Goodbye old friends and hello new friends. We know that being a first year is hard; we have all been there. Whether you‘re an international student or grew up in Claremont, there is still a big transition. When I was a first year, the Scripps Voice (Juliette Des Rosiers ’26, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus) compiled a list of 50 bucket-list items to guide the first-year canon experiences. Seeing this pasted in people‘s dorms was a fun way to suss out what people were doing, who they were, and made me feel a lot more normal about crying that first night in my dorm. So, without further ado, I present the extended freshmen bucket list: 100 items for Scripps’ centennial year.
☐ Cry first night in the dorm
☐ Make first week friends in your NSPO group
☐ Skip NSPO programming to tan at the pool
☐ Sign The Book in Denison at Matriculation
☐ Sing “California Gurls” or “Life is a Highway” at the Matriculation dance
☐ Gain 100+ Instagram followers in a week
☐ Go to Wednesday Tea
☐ Go to SAS Sunday snack
☐ Join a Scripps CLORG
☐ Choose to join the Frisbee team or Rugby team (the only binary that exists at Scripps)
☐ Have a crush on someone the first month, and they become your best friend
☐ Have a dramatic falling out with your roommates
☐ Buy a ton of new clothes and reinvent your style
☐ Bleach your hair / or eyebrows
☐ Get a piercing that makes your mom scared that California has changed you (I.E., eyebrow piercing, lip ring, tongue, belly button, septum)
☐ Have an intense two-week love bombing relationship but then never see them again
☐ Watch the sunset from the Schow roof
☐ Meet someone from the Bay Area
☐ Meet so many people from New York you wonder if some of them are lying and are actually from Westchester
☐ Meet someone from your state you have mutuals with
☐ Realize that your Core A experience is vastly different from your friend’s, either for good or for worse
☐ Avoid the creepy senior men who only go for first-years
☐ Wait in the Sunday Malott avocado toast line for more than ten minutes
☐ Transition from using a backpack to a tote bag
☐ Fall victim to the Claremont Crawl (trademarked for when your friendgroup pregames and hops around the 5Cs in hopes of a fun party)
☐ Hook up with someone in the Browning Tower
☐ Paint a bird in the Browning Tower
☐ Take a weird random class that will help you in no way (let’s be honest here)
☐ Get jump scared by a man in Tiernan (and then work on deconstructing internalized cisheteronormative gender essentialism)
☐ Get jump scared by a male professor in Tiernan (and then work on lifting heavier than them)
☐ Go to a party that has less than five people
☐ Get the freak flu (trademarked)
☐ Go to SHS (Student Health Services)
☐ Decide you never want to go to SHS again
☐ Start a fight in the dorm GroupMe
☐ Find Professor Adam Novy’s Instagram devoted to his cats
☐ Go to the Writing Center!
☐ Have a crush on your Writing Center tutor
☐ Make up a nickname for your favorite campus celebrity
☐ Have said campus celebrity catch on to the nickname
☐ Eat pasta at McConnell for dinner on Saturday
☐ Have a drunk interaction with your NSPO leader
☐ Go to Frank Sunday brunch for sushi
☐ Go back for seconds when Malott has acai on Saturdays
☐ Clean (someone’s? Your?) hair out of the shower drain
☐ Read all the books for Core A cover to cover (or don’t)
☐ Spend a whole day at the pool when you “should” be studying (it’s good to take a break sometimes!)
☐ Cry from homesickness/a bad grade/a bad day (It happens! It will be okay!)
☐ Go to the Sixth Street “rivalry” football game
☐ Poop in a single-stall, gender-neutral dorm bathroom (Nuke the gender nu)
☐‘Bush Push’ your friend (trademarked)
☐ Go to an improv show
☐ Pick a preferred improv group
☐ Take someone’s laundry out of the machine less than five minutes after the timer goes off
☐ Catch someone taking YOUR laundry out of the machine less than five minutes after the timer goes off
☐ Go to a teach-in/study-in to engage with newly formed values
☐ Decide on a roommate for next year and then get dropped by said roommate (dodged a bullet here)
☐ Buy a Jellycat at the Grove
☐ Have a nervous breakdown selecting your room for next year
☐ Get assigned a terrible class registration time and watch the classes you want fill up
☐ Walk to the farmers market and buy nothing
☐ Make a survey on your dorm door whiteboard
☐ Submit a PERM
☐ Lie in your PERM
☐ Have your PERM accepted (congrats!)
☐ Have your PERM ignored
☐ Have your PERM not simply ignored but rejected (how dare they!)
☐ Take a class that reorganizes how you think about the world
☐ Change what you want your major to be
☐ Almost step on a Scripps squirrel as it runs across the path in front of you
☐ Have beef with a squirrel that shakes leaves on your table in Seal Court
☐ Fall in love with a senior and try to convince her age is just a number (if she’s normal, she’ll reject you)
☐ Pick fresh fruit from the trees around campus
☐ Find the more hidden kumquat trees once all the ripe ones are gone
☐ Find a cigarette in Star Court
☐ Find a condom on Green Beach
☐ Run into an ex-something in a dining hall
☐ Wait thirty minutes in line for a Motley drink
☐ Be late to class waiting for a Motley drink
☐ Win a Rose Toy at Sex Week trivia
☐ Get Fizzed about
☐ Go Fizz viral
☐ Make a friend from each 5C!
☐ Make an enemy from each 5C!
☐ Get merch from the Scripps store
☐ Have a shower party with friends: entails blasting music, sharing products, and every stall filled
☐ Spend way too much money on a niche Halloween costume you have to explain
☐ Go down the Browning slide
☐ Have a barbecue in the Toll garden
☐ Get an on-campus job and have it consume your time and personality
☐ Feel more comfortable in who you are
☐ Go to a Quegger
☐ Go to Mudd Cage fights
☐ Go down the waterslide at Pirate Party
☐ Go to Harvey Mudd trampoline
☐ Realize some of these people will be in your wedding
☐ Get your first B on an assignment and question everything
☐ Wait to pack until the morning of your flight
☐ Write an article for the Scripps Voice
☐ Finish your first year of college!
